ome of the Internet’s most useful social media tools are providing ways for military families to communicate despite all geographical boundaries. The Web world contains a cross-
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country, cross-continent network of families who face the unique dilemmas of military life. Blogs by military spouses share in-depth stories of how they cope and thrive on the home front while missing their soldiers far away. Bloggers take care not to divulge sensitive details about their loved one’s units and whereabouts, but they’re free to express their thoughts and feelings like nowhere else. There may be political rants and the perfect “tough as soldiers” care package brownie recipe, sometimes on the same site.
Writing Her Way Out Brie’Anne Griffin’s blog at
hurryupandwaitbrieanne.blogspot.com originated during struggles obtaining disability benefit payments owed her husband, Michael, who served in the Army National Guard for 22 years and was injured while on active duty. “My motivation was frustration,” Griffin said. The 32-year-old teacher and president of Auxiliary 8671, Prescott, Arkansas, said her blog was an emotional outlet and a paper trail documenting their trials in a bureaucratic quagmire. “It very much helped with my anxiety with it and my frustration with it,” she said. “It always helps me to write. It’s my therapy.”
It was also a way to say to others, “You’re not the only one going
through this, and this is how I got help, or this is how I got the situation resolved,” Griffin said. Also District 10 President, Griffin said she promotes her Auxiliary and District through the relatively new tool of facebook. As she campaigned for the office of Department Guard, she said she wants to apply social media in any Auxiliary position she may hold to reach a broader audience and a younger demographic, “because we do have a new generation of veterans who have been hard to reach.”
Don’t Go it Alone
Candace Lindemann’s website,
armywiveslives.com, received 70 visitors a day when she started blogging in 2004 after her husband joined the military.
“I wanted to document our experience,” Lindemann said. “I thought it was in some ways a semi- unique situation. I thought it might help some people.” The Lindemanns are New
Yorkers. Both went to school at Yale and neither knew anyone in the military except in their grandparents’ generation. Candace’s husband, now a National Guardsman, was an artillery officer on active duty for four years, one of them in Iraq. “I felt kind of lonely,” she said. “My friends wanted very much to be supportive...but they couldn’t relate. I was really trying to reach out to other military spouses so I would feel that support.”
Lindemann also includes excerpts
from other spouses’ posts, and traffic on her site has hit 6,000-7,000 unique visitors per month. She started
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